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Nell's truck heads back down the drive. A few minutes later Knox kneels on the threshold with the drill and goes to work on the door.

"Rules," he says, without looking up.

I lean against the inside wall where I can watch his hands. They're big and scarred across every knuckle, and they handle the drill fast and sure. I watch them, and my mouth goes dry. Heat climbs up my neck until I make myself look at the door frame instead.

"You don't go past this yard without me. Between here and my back door is fine. Not the barn, not the road. Nobody comes to this door but me, Hector, or my brother Beckett. Anybody else shows up, you lock it and yell for me. You eat what I bring you, and you take Nell's pills."

When the bolt slides home clean, he steps out onto the porch and stays there.

He holds both new brass keys out on his open palm. "That's all of them."

I take them without our hands touching.

"Your rules stop at this door," I say. "The bolt's on my side."

"That's why I put it there." He doesn't move off the porch. "Last one. When you're ready to tell somebody who did this, you tell me first. Not my brother Jesse. Not some deputy. Me."

"The sheriff never came looking for me," I say.

"Harlan died last night. Whoever replaces him doesn't hear your name before I do."

Harlan's dead, and I'll never get to watch him pay. I feel cheated, and that's all I feel.

"Yard, door, food, pills," I say. "Fine."

"And the last one?"

"When I'm ready."

Knox's fingers drum against the doorframe. I wait for him to push, but he lets it sit. "Then that one waits until you are."

His eyes drop to Royce's boots, standing by the door where I kicked them off last night, with the blood dried black in the leather. "Whose boots?"

In the Thornton barn I learned to hand a man one ugly piece of the truth and watch what he does with it before I give him anything else. I give Knox one piece now.

"They belonged to the man who came to load me onto a truck," I say. "I drove a steel rod through his neck."

Knox doesn't flinch, and he doesn't look sorry for me. "Good."

My shoulders finally come down from around my ears, but I hate that I needed a man to tell me I did right.

"Where'd they keep you?" he asks.

I keep my mouth shut. He doesn't ask twice.

"You want those boots gone?"

"No."

"Then they go in the bottom drawer of that dresser, and they stay between you and me."

He packs up his tools, slings his rifle over his shoulder, and picks up the toolbox and the cold bowl of stew.

He's at the top of the steps when he stops. "There's no fight card this weekend," he says. "Or the next. I'm not having strangers on this place."

"Your regulars won't like that."

"Ozzie can earn his cut answering the phone."